SAN FRANCISCO, CA - Apartment List, the fastest-growing rental marketplace with 600,000 unique listings and 1.5 million monthly users, just announced its acquisition of RentAdvisor. Atlanta-based RentAdvisor, the leading ratings and reviews platform in the rental industry will equip Apartment List with content that will allow users to make smarter real estate decisions.
Apartment List co-founders John Kobs and Chris Herndon chose RentAdvisor due to the company’s ability to capture the full rental picture. Many other ratings and reviews platforms suffer from predominantly negative reviews, written by renters unhappy enough to seek out forums to vent their frustration. These perspectives are valuable and frequently prevent renters from making poor rental decisions.
In an effort to enhance the rental search process and provide a more balanced perspective to its users, RentAdvisor works with property managers to contact every individual resident in a given property. Through this strategy, RentAdvisor converts an impressive 10% of residents into giving reviews. Since advice is solicited from everyone, feedback ranges from happy to angry to indifferent. Community managers are also encouraged to respond to all feedback.
“Our goal is to solve the adverse selection issues that currently plague many ratings and reviews sites,” said Robert Turnbull, President and Co-Founder at RentAdvisor. “By offering every renter an opportunity to share his or her perspective, we are able to provide an authentic and transparent forum for prospective renters and community managers to engage with residents.”
Apartment List also identified RentAdvisor as a platform with limitless upside potential. The team is currently in the process of layering RentAdvisor review content onto Apartment List’s property database, which will provide Apartment List users with unique content they can’t find anywhere else.
“If we can solicit a robust and balanced set of reviews for 1,000 large apartment communities, then why not repeat this formula for all 50,000 professionally managed properties?” said Chris Herndon, President and Co-Founder of Apartment List. “And for that matter, why stop at large buildings? Rent Advisor’s platform is flexible and scalable enough to apply to all types of rentals, from apartment buildings to townhomes and single-family houses.”
Along with great content and a scalable platform, this acquisition comes with a superstar team, led by industry veterans Jamie Gallo, Robert Turnbull and Jonathan Ford who formerly grew ApartmentGuide.com into a leading multifamily internet listing site (ILS). By merging the products, ideas, skills and resources of both teams, Apartment List aims to become the definitive rental marketplace.